In search of the sound of silence

TICK. Tock. Tick. I would do a much better job reviewing books if the clock in my office didn't thump out the seconds like a crazed drummer. The dog's tail whacks the floor. The floor creaks. How does anyone expect me to write in the midst of this racket?

It doesn't surprise me that many of my fellow writers share my fantasies of a golden bubble of silence. Why else do we have writer's retreats, tucked into sheltering forests or beside pastoral streams (where, frankly, the water gurgles damn noisily)?

(Image: Tammy Hanratty/Corbis)

Three new books embrace this silence-is-golden theme. George Prochnik's In Pursuit of Silence and George Michael Foy's Zero Decibels focus on hunting for the perfect hush. In The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want, Garret Keizer takes another route, critically surveying the cacophony of our industrial world.

Keizer's is probably the most realistic approach because - as becomes obvious - books about silence inevitably turn into books about noise. As both Prochnik and Foy quickly discover, quiet is an elusive goal in our surround-sound environment. (Must my husband have the television blaring at this moment?)

Foy becomes so obsessed with the constant roar of life around him that he begins to think of the sound as something almost alive, the rumbling exhale of a great creature, "the monster-breath". He buys an audiometer, which measures noise in decibels. Zero decibels refers to the tiniest sound audible to healthy human ears, an infinitesimal notch above silence. The sound of your own breath in a quiet room is about 30 dB; the hum of a refrigerator averages above 50. Subway trains register in the 90s. The scale refers to the pressure of sound waves on the ears, with rising numbers indicating a logarithmic increase. On the decibel scale, Foy notes, a jet engine at 120 dB generates a trillion times more sound-wave pressure than one of those fleeting whispers at 0 dB.

Foy obsessively measures the sounds of daily life as he searches for his zero-decibel moment. Eventually, he resorts to spending time in a sensory deprivation tank. Prochnik also tries sensory deprivation, and discovers that with no distraction he can hear the sound of saliva swooshing in his mouth. In further pursuit of quiet, Prochnik goes on to investigate noise-control regulations and soundproofing technologies.

My favourite part of Prochnik's journey is the time he spends at a Trappist monastery in Iowa, tucked away in a landscape of gentle hills and small farms. It allows him to ponder the idea that "some things we cannot put into words are yet resoundingly real", and captures the author's belief that if we can find a way to listen we may eventually hear the voice of our better selves.

Foy's book is edgier, jazzier. He has an elegant way with description - lakes are "the colour of Parker ink" and rocks rise from the ground "like the back of a surfacing whale". But his perspective is darker. When he visits the famously taciturn Lakota Indians, for instance, he finds them not so much beautifully silent but culturally crushed, left with nothing to say.

Keizer, on the other hand, likes the idea of a joyful noise. He watches two young boys poised to roar off on all-terrain vehicles and feels a leap of happiness. "I wanted them and their noise to exist forever." But the occasional tribute to rowdy children aside, he is no noise lover either.

For Keizer, the real noise is the noise of industry, and noise pollution and industrial pollution walk arm in arm. "The history of noise in this book is in many ways an implicit history of fossil fuels," he notes. Industrialisation has left us with a decibel-blasted lifestyle that doctors link to depression and rage. People have killed their neighbours for refusing to turn off the stereo.

And that's what really ties these three books together. It's not just any noise that makes us crazy, it's our noise - our amplified sound systems, our revving engines, the whole exasperating, jangling loudness of modern life.

So, these writers agree, if there is no perfect quiet, it wouldn't hurt us all to turn it down a little, respect our neighbours' need for occasional peace and find a little ourselves. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm taking the battery out of the clock and asking my husband to turn down that movie. Otherwise I don't know how anyone expects me to finish this review.

Book information:In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for meaning in a world of noise by George Prochnik
Published by Doubleday
$26

Zero Decibels: The quest for absolute silence by George Michelsen Foy
Published by Scribner
$24

The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A book about noise by Garret Keizer
Published by Public Affairs
$27.95

2 Comments

How about telling us which of these three books is the best on the topic? I'm already interested in purchasing one based on the topic. But I don't want to have to read all three!

fangorn
on May 5, 2010 4:36 AM

There’s another noise, more than just annoying, and internal. Tinnitus is a constant and total absence of silence. Exploring the topics of sound, noise, and silence doesn’t come even close to the debilitating effects of this condition. If these books do not warn loudly and explicitly against the dangers of noise and the damage it can cause to your hearing, they aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Losing your hearing may not be the silence you think you want.